What is going on here? The University of Minnesota is hosting its annual Deep Bench tournament on Saturday, October 20, 2007. Tournament editors are Rob Carson (cars0090@umnREMOVETHISLARGEBLOCKOFCAPITALIZEDTEXT.edu) and Andrew Hart (limozeen@gmail.com). Weâ€™re making several significant changes to the distribution, question length, and bonus requirements in an effort to make this a better tournament. It would be excellent to see the kind of turnout for Deep Bench that Wisconsinâ€™s Elvis reincarnation received last year, and I can promise at least two fewer El Cid questions. Stay tuned for field updates as well as finalized times and locations.

Deep Bench Format: Each school has a team of eight players, and each player plays for both a singles or doubles team and a quads team. So each of the eight will play for either first or second singles, or first, second or third doubles, and those teams will be somehow reconstituted as two four-person quads teams. Each win by a #1 team (singles, doubles, or quads) will be worth 5 points. Each win by a #2 team will be worth 4 points, and each win by #3 doubles will be worth 3 points. The team with the most points at the end of the tournament wins.

Update: This will NOT be a timed tournament like in past years. Rounds will be probably 22 questions in length with a 1-question tiebreaker, though they could be 24 depending on the number of solid submissions we get.

Logistics: The tournament format is two single round robins. The first is of singles/doubles play within each classification (each #1 singles will play all other #1 singles players, and so on, simultaneously). This phase will be held on packets of 24 tossups, no bonuses. The second phase is a single round robin in which all the #1 quads and all the #2 quads teams will play each other. This tournament will take place on 24 tossup, 24 bonus packets. The singles/doubles rounds will alternate. Each player is guaranteed to play (total teams * 2) â€“ 2 packets (so 16 in a nine-team field). The format works best with an odd number of teams, and we want as many teams competing as want to play. If more than seven teams are interested in fielding a team, there is a good possibility that there would be rounds on Friday night. This will be confirmed or denied soon.

Who can come? Traditionally Deep Bench has been a true invitational, but this year will be a little different. We extend invitations to all teams invited last year and a few new ones. Any other school that can field an eight-player team is welcome to email limozeen@gmail.com to solicit an invitation. Any team that wants to play will be able to play.

Submission Requirements and Difficulty: Each team is required to submit two packets worth of questions, one for quads and one for singles/doubles play. Teams must submit 25/25 for quads play and 25/0 for singles/doubles play. The 25/25 for quads should be moderate to difficult (in the neighborhood of Division I SCT or ACF Regionals) while the 25/0 should be more accessible (harder than IS sets, but not by much) because of the nature of singles and doubles play. You will not be playing questions written by any of your teammates, so anyone on the team can write these questions. Obviously keep them blind to other teams competing.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this originally. Please separate your tossups and bonuses by category, with a category header labeling each. IE, all lit tossups, then all lit bonuses, then all history tossups, then all history bonuses, and so forth.

[b]Tossup length: Tossups will be longer than the ones at last yearâ€™s Deep Bench. Since your editors have no desire to do character counts on each tossup, use this convenient guide: Using the default page formatting of 10 point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, tossups must be longer than 4 lines, but shorter than 6 lines. Questions that are consistently shorter or longer than these will be spitefully returned for rewriting.

Power Tossups: There will be power tossups at this tournament, but the editors will place them. Please do not insert power marks into your tossups. It will annoy me and I will probably email your packet back to you to make you get rid of them.

Bonuses: Bonuses should be in the 10-10-10 format with ascending difficulty. The first part should be gettable by nearly all of the teams, the middle part should be converted by around half the teams, and the hard part by the best fifth of the field or so. All bonuses must have an easy, middle, and hard part, but they can be out of ascending order if doing so is necessary. Please avoid 30-20-10 bonuses, 10-5-10-5-10-5 bonuses, or any other whacky formats. If your packet contains bonuses that deviate significantly from this guide it will be returned spitefully for rewriting.

Distribution: This distribution is somewhere in between the traditional Deep Bench format and a typical circuit tournament. These numbers lump together the singles/doubles and quads rounds, but please keep these packets distinct as the difficulty gap will be significant. Take care to balance the distribution by geographic region, time, language, etc.

2/1 Social Science (Includes anthropology, psychology, economics, archaeology, game theory, sociology, law, linguistics. No more than one question per field)

2/1 Geography

2/1 Current Events

2/1 Pop Culture

2/1 Sports

TOTAL: 50/25

Packet Formatting: Packets must be emailed to limozeen@gmail.com as a .doc or .rtf file. They must be typed in Times New Roman, 10 point font, with 1-inch margins all around (note that this is not the MSWord default). Below is the formatting required. Note convention for prompts, do not accepts, and alternate answers. Packets that deviate significantly from this will be spitefully returned for reformatting.

Tossups should look like this:

He lists Pepsi products under his Facebook interests, which led a newspaper reporter to contact him regarding Coca-Colaâ€™s monopoly on his universityâ€™s campus. He was nicknamed â€œshadesâ€

Last edited by theMoMA on Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:15 am, edited 11 times in total.

I know that in the past the University of Iowa has held This Tournament Goes to Eleven around this time. I believe that they schedule the tournament on a weekend where the football team does not have a home game.

I looked at the University of Iowa football schedule for 2007 and they have home games on October 13 and October 27, and away games on October 6, October 20, and November 3.

I don't know if the University of Iowa is planning on holding this tournament this year, and if they are what weekend it will be. It was held on the weekend of October 21-22 last year.

In seriousness, though, we'd love to attend and are already assembling a team. This was the first tournament I ever played in, actually, and I had a blast. It would be great to see it come back to prominence.

No results have been posted yet, so I figured I would provide a summary of the results as I remember them.

One thing to note is that the singles and doubles portion of the tournament were canceled after round 2. I am not sure exactly why, but I think it was because of time issues, as only two rounds (two quad rounds, and two singles/doubles rounds had been played by 2 o'clock).

The stats from the singles/doubles rounds that were played were discounted.

Illinois won the tournament with 68 points, and Wisconsin was 2nd with 67 points.

In division 1 Illinois won with an 8-0 record. Wisconsin went 7-1 and finished in second place. Drake went 6-2 and finished in third place.

The top scorer was Mike Sorice from Illinois with 133 points per game. I (Brendan Byrne) was 2nd with 77.5 points per game. Andy Kravis from Michigan was 3rd, and Gabe Lyon from Wisconsin was 4th.

I won the neg prize with 15. Mike Sorice and Gabe Lyon both finished second with 13 negs.

In division 2 Illinois and Wisconsin got first and second in some order.

It was disappointing that the singles and doubles rounds were canceled, but it was still a pretty fun tournament. The questions were great.

Just a quick correction. There was a player for ISU who had 13 negs. Sorice and Lyon both had 12. I'll have full stats up today or tomorrow.

As for singles and doubles getting canceled, it was all time-related. We had some scheduling issues during the first part of the games, and used up a lot of time trying to run the first two games. As it was, we still finished rather late, and I'm glad everyone was fair to the other teams and stuck around. The scheduling issues were mostly my fault...I underestimated how long it would take to run singles and doubles rounds one after another, and the fact that we didn't have a working schedule at the beginning really worked against us. Anyway, I apologize, and I'm glad we got to get through all 9 quads rounds, since those were the centerpiece of the set.

I regret to announce that apparently Deep Bench stats were not saved, nor were scoresheets kept. I'm not really sure why this happened, or why it wasn't brought to my attention immediately when we presumably could have done something about it, but I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Eric Mukherjee Brown University '09Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania '17

"The accumulated filth of all their stupidity and irrationality will foam up about their waists and all the Jehovah’s witnesses refusing blood transfusions, drug-seekers, creationists, new agers, anti-vaccination nutjobs, scientologists, and AIDS deniers will look up and shout ‘save us!’…and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no’” –Rorschach MD